Arnie Wilson drifted from national newspaper and TV news and current affairs (on screen and off), celebrity interviewing and travel writing to ski journalism. A midlife passion for the slopes gradually took over his life and he spent 15 years as the Financial Times ski correspondent before taking over as editor of the Ski Club of Great Britain’s magazine, Ski+board between 2001 and 2014. He entered the Guinness Book of Records in 1994 after skiing for 365 consecutive days in 240 resorts in 13 countries, and recently completed a 35 year mission to ski in all 37 US states with ski lifts. This year he notched up his 710th ski area worldwide. He has written or co-written five ski books.

Entries by Arnie Wilson

The Scattered by Richard Holledge I was having one of those chats about the meaning of life - from the fall of the British Labour Party to the rise of Donald Trump's comb over - when our conversation turned to the plight of the refugees forced out of their...

It has taken Bob Roberts a quarter of a century - during which time he was heavily preoccupied running California's ski industry as President and CEO - to get his father Mike's life story into print. The result is a fascinating glossy tome called Wish You Were Here...The Life And...

Drat! He's done it again. But how? You Are Dead, the best-selling author Peter James' 11th annual offering about a fictional British detective, Roy Grace, may just be his best yet. Well, his publishers would say that, wouldn't they? After all, they said it last year after the publication of...

I DIDN'T LIKE THIS at all. We'd gone to bed early after a wonderful dinner of "Walser" dumplings, risotto with apples, walnuts and local Fontina cheese, stewed venison with polenta and mash, followed by apple fritters and canestrelli (little...

This is a true story. It happened just the other day. My good friend Leo, who lives in my town but whose roots are in Gibraltar where his partner Lourdes lives (he visits her every month) sends her a loving text in Spanish every morning from Sussex....

The other night my wife Vivianne and I saw a London production of Skylight - starring Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan - and at one stage Carey Mulligan starts crying. Unlike making a movie, where the camera can switch off allowing an actor to be able to add water to...

Peter James celebrated 10 years of Roy Grace - the fictional Brighton (UK) police chief superintendent that has seen James move from the championship to the premiership of crime writing - with Want You Dead. For those unfamiliar with his books, every one he's written since Dead Simple kicked off...

The most evocative page of the BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner's updated memoir Blood & Sand is one that even readers with acute 20-20 vision would probably need a magnifying glass to read. It's the then confidential medical report from the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh the day after...

Hearing exciting but unconfirmed rumors that scientists at the Arecibo Observatory - which monitors potential signals for the SETI programme (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the remote hinterland of Puerto Rico - had picked up a series of unexplained sounds from deep space, I rang my contact there to try...

Storming the Eagle's Nest, by Jim Ring, is published by Faber and Faber.

Did you know that on April 25, 1945, 359 Lancaster bombers blitzed Hitler's lair high above Berchtesgaden? Nor did I until I read Jim Ring's latest book. Hitler wasn't at home, but he killed himself five days...

OK, it's not his original mnemonic to help remember geological eras, but just about everything else in his remarkably all-encompassing and superbly illustrated book about dinosaurs is the result of Keiron Pim's own intensive work and research -- and what...

The barely credible story of German air-ace Helmut Bergmann's murderous but triumphant 46 minutes of ice-cold attacking genius against a wave of RAF bombers two nights after Easter, 1944 sounds as though it should have been dismissed as the kind of fiction found in a schoolboy comic. But as the...